Telltale games working on a Mac (Without Boot Camp!)
I think I might have finally discovered the holy grail for Mac users on this forum 
I've managed to get Sam and Max running on a Mac without rebooting into Windows. The game runs smoothly with no apparent graphical problems or slowdown. The launcher screen is perfect apart from the Launch Game button not appearing. Just click where the button should be and the game will launch.
You'll need CrossOver Games (http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxgames/) to run the game. The software costs $40 but a 30-day trial is also available. On the plus side you don't need a copy of Windows to run the software so that saves a bit of money.
Here's how I got everything working:
1) Install CrossOver Games and run it.
2) Download Internet Explorer 6 from Microsoft's website (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ie6/downloads/critical/ie6sp1/default.mspx) and download a Sam and Max episode.
3) In CrossOver Games, click the Configure menu and choose 'Install Software'.
4) Click the 'Install Unsupported Software' button, follow the wizard and choose to install into a new bottle. Give the bottle a name (like 'Sam and Max') and set the bottle type to 'win98'. Click Create.
5) Click the Install button in the next screen and then locate the ie6setup.exe file you downloaded from Microsoft's website. Follow the installer, choosing to install a typical installation.
6) Click Finish when the installer is done. CrossOver will simulate a Windows reboot. Click Finished in the CrossOver window when it is done.
7) Click on the Configure Menu and choose 'Manage Bottles'. Choose the bottle you created in the left-hand list. Click the Control Panel tab on the right and double-click 'winecfg'. Set the Windows version at the bottom of the window to Windows Vista. Click OK to close the window. You can also close the Manage Bottles window.
8) To install Sam and Max, choose Install Software in the Configure menu. Click Install Unsupported Software, but this time choose to install into an existing bottle. Pick the bottle you created before. Follow the wizard and point it to the Sam and Max installer from Telltale.
9) Install the game as normal and uncheck 'Play Now' at the end of the install.
10) When CrossOver is finished installing, simply click on the Programs menu in CrossOver to launch the game. To install more episodes, just repeat step 8.
This process works perfectly on my MacBook Pro. I've only tested Abe Lincoln Must Die (Season 1) and Chariot of the Dogs (Season 2) so I'm not sure if this works for all the episodes. It'd be good to hear if it works for other people with different configurations.
Hope this helps!
I've managed to get Sam and Max running on a Mac without rebooting into Windows. The game runs smoothly with no apparent graphical problems or slowdown. The launcher screen is perfect apart from the Launch Game button not appearing. Just click where the button should be and the game will launch.You'll need CrossOver Games (http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxgames/) to run the game. The software costs $40 but a 30-day trial is also available. On the plus side you don't need a copy of Windows to run the software so that saves a bit of money.
Here's how I got everything working:
1) Install CrossOver Games and run it.
2) Download Internet Explorer 6 from Microsoft's website (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ie6/downloads/critical/ie6sp1/default.mspx) and download a Sam and Max episode.
3) In CrossOver Games, click the Configure menu and choose 'Install Software'.
4) Click the 'Install Unsupported Software' button, follow the wizard and choose to install into a new bottle. Give the bottle a name (like 'Sam and Max') and set the bottle type to 'win98'. Click Create.
5) Click the Install button in the next screen and then locate the ie6setup.exe file you downloaded from Microsoft's website. Follow the installer, choosing to install a typical installation.
6) Click Finish when the installer is done. CrossOver will simulate a Windows reboot. Click Finished in the CrossOver window when it is done.
7) Click on the Configure Menu and choose 'Manage Bottles'. Choose the bottle you created in the left-hand list. Click the Control Panel tab on the right and double-click 'winecfg'. Set the Windows version at the bottom of the window to Windows Vista. Click OK to close the window. You can also close the Manage Bottles window.
8) To install Sam and Max, choose Install Software in the Configure menu. Click Install Unsupported Software, but this time choose to install into an existing bottle. Pick the bottle you created before. Follow the wizard and point it to the Sam and Max installer from Telltale.
9) Install the game as normal and uncheck 'Play Now' at the end of the install.
10) When CrossOver is finished installing, simply click on the Programs menu in CrossOver to launch the game. To install more episodes, just repeat step 8.
This process works perfectly on my MacBook Pro. I've only tested Abe Lincoln Must Die (Season 1) and Chariot of the Dogs (Season 2) so I'm not sure if this works for all the episodes. It'd be good to hear if it works for other people with different configurations.
Hope this helps!
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Comments
It works very great, but of course, we lost bump mapping and optimisation (some v-sync problems for me and a flat ice-cream texture on the sludgies stand), but it's the first time I see running Sam&Max so well under my OS X
The free trial is only 7 days.
EDIT: No luck with Strong Bad. The icon appears in my dock but the game never launches, and after a while the icon just goes away.
EDIT2: Sam & Max 205 works, but it's kind of laggy, even with the graphics quality set to low. Then again, I'm using a low-spec MacBook with integrated graphics, so that's probably to be expected.
All in all, it's a neat trick! I hope some Mac users out there are able to play the games this way.
Yeah, it's only for Intel Macs. They don't seem to support PowerPC.
@Emily:
Whoops, I thought it was a 30-day trial. I can't get Strong Bad working either. It seems like some other trick is needed to get it started, probably DirectX related.
*sad deli*
Yeah thats what happened when I tried it, but Sam and Max work.
Tried looking around the CrossOver site for what components of DirectX they use, but couldn't find anything. It's not just "9.0c" but the 9.0c rev 27 as a minimum; Having up to at least 29 would be ideal.
Alternatively, you could wait (probably a long wait) for Wine's Intel Mac build to be improved enough to support the Telltale Tool.
CrossOver Games for the Mac actually uses a version of Wine. The latest version of CrossOver Games is based on the Wine 1.0 codebase.
What did you do/how was it ruined? I've installed Windows XP via Bootcamp on several Macs, without any hitches.
Well that's a bummer. I thought this could've been a decent stop gap until I can upgrade to Leopard. I'm still kinda mad that they killed the Boot Camp beta for Tiger users
It just ruined my computer. It was version 9 & I guess it was too much of an upgrade & made it all messed up. Of course my imac has always been messed up.
What do you mean by 'the old Telltale format'? Our games have always been Windows-only for the downloadable versions.
Was that really a productive contribution to the discussion?
I think he means the fact the Strong Bad won't work with this method.
I am not angry.
I hope Crossover's system will improve well, even if it annoys me because I have a very strong configuration and can't fully use it with telltale games because of that.
Version 9 of what? Do you mean Mac OS 9 or DirectX 9? How old is your book anyway? Go to http://www.everymac.com and point me out what computer you have. It'll make me understand your problem easier.
yeah it doesn't work in parallels either, but sam & max works fine (both seasons).
Some technical notes as I've played through the first three episodes:
-Performance seems extremely good, the only time I've noticed frame rate drops is during car scenes.
-A very small percentage of textures don't rasterize properly, and appear black. This has happened less as each episode has progressed -- my guess is that there's a specific texture or vertex format not supported correctly by the wine engine. In case anyone at telltale is interested in checking to see what's different about it, an example of this is in 2x01 -- the star topiary outside santa's house is black when in its original state. (interestingly, it is properly textured when in its modified state) I only noticed 1 or 2 bad textures in 2x02, and none so far in 2x03.
-Shaders do work, or at least the ones I'm aware of -- reflection works, 'dynamic lighting' works (such as the lightning flashes outside the zombie factory that affect sam & max's models too).
-Scene changes take a noticably long time (10-15 seconds), and pressing escape / clicking the gear takes ~5 seconds. The scene changes are due to loading the new scene from disk (I watched an activity monitor while the pause was occuring), and are usually much faster once a scene is revisited during a play session (alluding to the scenes being cached in RAM by the engine). I don't know why pressing escape takes so long -- there's no disk activity, maybe you're making some win32 calls or allocating memory in a way that takes more time to fulfill than on native Windows. As a point of reference, I have a high end macbook pro (2.6 GHz Core 2 Duo) with 7200rpm drive and 4 gigs of ram. Also, back when I played season 1 on Parallels, the same latencies occured both in menus and scene changes.
-Mouse works perfectly, it only stutters when framerate stutters and otherwise moves at the same speed as the system.
-Like Emily mentioned, the 'Launch game' button doesn't show properly in the game launcher. It's still clickable, but doesn't appear properly. Some fiddling with the HTML/CSS of the page would probably fix this.
-Music seems very high quality, but the voices seem scratchy and buzzy, as if they're compressed at a lower bit rate. It makes it a lot harder for me to hear them, personally. I don't know if this is how it is in the Windows experience too..if so maybe you guys can compress voices at a slightly higher rate in the future
-In the save/load screen, all screenshots are black. This may be due to the same texture issue mentioned earlier.
-I'm having a lot of fun and cracking up in laughter as I play through these games.
Given how well it works, maybe you guys can get together with Codeweavers (http://codeweavers.com/) and publish sam & max on mac with an integrated version of Crossover. I feel like it would be virtually no work for you, since the experience is already almost perfect and could be released as is (aside from the launch game button issue). Also, this runs way way better than it does on Parallels.
wasn't BONE also for mac?
Any ideas? Thanks.
Was that? Or this? Or this? Or....you get the idea